Fig. 4. Schematic diagram showing predicted results for MEG cross-decoding of illusory faces vs. objects based on two possible accounts: (i) rapid processing based on low-level visual features (green line), or (ii), slower reinterpretation of the image (orange line).

Relative to decoding human faces vs. objects (gray line), performance is expected to be reduced because illusory face images share many more visual features with the matched object images than they do with human face images, thus brain activation patterns for these categories are expected to be less separable. See Fig. 5a for the empirical results.